So, the reason for the slow progress on any new additions to TapSplosion is because of my Free Version’s Adverts. If you have played TapSplosion Free, you have probably noticed that ALL of the adverts are of the same type (Daily Deals) … This is a problem with the SDK, which is completely broken:

To begin with, I wasn’t getting any Clicks registered for when I click the adverts in the game, and since it is Pay-per-Click, that is bad! After talking with their support (which was pretty decent) they eventually recognised that it is their problem and not mine. They managed to fix something in the background (with the XMLs) which eventually got the SDK to recognised my clicks, which meant I could finally get some revenue from my adverts, but they still have the problem of only one type of Advert showing, which is still a big problem.

They are aiming for a new SDK at the beginning of next week, and I’m happy to stick with them for a big longer to try and get this fixed for the Windows Phone 7 community, since it’s the only alternative for XNA games. It’s just a shame that I had to test out their SDK in a live app before they realised their SDK is totally broken.

As for the figures that matter, they are not very impressive at all. This may be due to the broken SDK, when that is fixed I’ll post some figures then, but at the moment I’m getting the following numbers:

Daily Requests: ~ 15k

Daily View: ~6k

Fill Rate: ~40% (Bad)

Average Daily Revenue: ~$4

eCPM: $0.297 (Revenue per 1k views)

CTR: ~0.55% (Click through rate)

Anyone used Microsofts Official SDK? I tried another SDK due to being in the UK, and outside of the US is not supported by Microsoft at the moment. How do my figures stack up to others? I’m guessing very badly because of the broken SDK!

I’ll let people know when they fix the SDK and if things improve … if I’m still getting a decent amount of impressions that is!

Today I’ve not really been editing or adding to the game. I’ve been on the lookout for Advertising SDK’s, since after reading a blog post about Ad’s being a valid way to Monetize apps on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace I thought I’d have a look into it.

As soon as I started I realised one major problem, Microsofts Advertising SDK can only be used by people with a valid US Tax Number and US Address, neither of them I have, and one of them is impossible to acquire. After some digging and asking questions I found out that Microsoft are planning to allow Western Europe to use the AdCenter very soon. I sit with my fingers crossed hoping that it is within this next month!

As for some alternatives to Microsoft’s own SDK, there are 2 that I could find. Smaato and Millennial Media:

Smaato SDK doesn’t even have any implementation details at all for XNA, only Silverlight (Even though it claims it works in both). So after trying everything I could think nothing seemed to work and I gave up (which is a shame, Smaato looked the best). The Silverlight implementation looks very simple, and looks as though it works well too! There are 3 Silverlight samples.

Millennial Media’s SDK is a little more friendly for XNA in the fact that it works and is only a few lines to implement! The main problem being that it draws behind everything, so you have to have an area on the screen where nothing is being drawn for the advert to be seen. I’ve not tried the Silverlight implementation, but just by looking at it, it seems to be extremely simple.

So after playing around with the SDK’s for probably over an Hour ( I started looking yesterday) I found that at this moment in time, monetizing free games for developers outside of the UK looks difficult. I’ll wait for the official solution!

I will (hopefully) be getting the artwork for the leaderboard screens later today! So tomorrow if everything implements well there may well be a video showing them in action!